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Monday, 21 January 2013

Notes from Open Access Forum, University of Kent

Introduction

Open Mic: the panel take questions after the talks

Over fifty members of staff gathered in the Senate
Chamber on 15 January to discuss issues around the Government’s Open Access
(OA) policy. This had been developed following the publication of Dame JanetFinch’s report in June, which recommended that

‘a clear policy direction should be set towards support
for publication in open access or hybrid journals...as the main vehicle for the
publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded’.

The Vice
Chancellor, Prof Dame Julia Goodfellow, opened the Forum by making clear that
‘the direction of travel has been set for us, it is for us to discuss the best
way to respond.’ She pointed out that the block funding from RCUK, some £59k
for Kent, did not cover the majority of either funded or self-funded research
that was currently undertaken, and that some thought needed to be given as to
how the OA costs for this would be met.

Ultimately the only possible source for these would be
QR. She emphasised that other institutions, both
large and small, were having to make similar decisions.

Before handing over to the other speakers, she outlined for
clarity the OA terms ‘gold’ and ‘green’:

GOLD open access is publication, normally in a standard
journal that allows free access to any articles for which an ‘article
processing charge’ (APC) has been paid. The RCUK block grant is intended to
offset these APCs.

GREEN open access is self-archiving of articles that
have appeared elsewhere. This may be in institutional repositories such as theKent Academic Repository (KAR), or subject-specific ones such as PubMed. The
Research Councils have stated that archiving must happen within 6 months (or 12
months for AHRC and ESRC).

Speakers

Prof Dick Jones(School of Computing, and Faculty
Director of Research for the Sciences), stated that ‘in principle’ many in the
Sciences were supportive of OA, and that many already did publish via OA
journals or self-archive. However, he had a number of concerns, including:

The cost of imposing OA universally. If even half the
articles currently published by the Faculty were made available via gold OA,
the cost would be between £250k-£750k;

Having to pay twice, for both APCs and for
subscriptions to the journals. This raised a further question of the iniquity
of the current publishing model, which relied on academics writing for,
editing, reviewing, reading and then paying for the journals.

How will APC funding be rationed? Will it be centrally? On what basis will it be provided – first come first served, or the merit of the work, or the impact factor of the journal?

The effect on learned societies. These relied on income
from subscriptions, and, in turn, supported and developed their community. If
their income source was to be removed they faced an uncertain future. Dr Ruth
Blakeley (below) concurred with this, suggesting that the loss of learned
societies would be more than ‘collateral damage’, as they provide support for
both the sector and HEFCE consultations.

One size does not fit all. There was a sense that OA
had been developed to suit the publication culture of STEM subjects, and was
not suited to the social science and humanities disciplines, which made more
use of monographs and ‘slow burn’ articles.

It would exacerbate the funding divide. STEM subjects
would require more funding for OA, and the policy would therefore exacerbate
the already considerable difference in funding between the sciences and social
sciences/humanities.

Intellectual property. The current policy suggested
that publications should be covered by the most permissive ‘creative commons’
licence, CC-BY. This license would let others distribute, remix, tweak, and
build upon academic work, even commercially, as long as they credit the author
for the original creation. Some perceive a danger in this: for instance, your
work may be ‘hijacked’ by causes of which you disapprove. You would have no
control over your work. Instead, the sector should push for the more
restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND.

OA & American journals. Many of the top journals
are based in the USA, which hasn’t mandated OA. As such, UK researchers with
RCUK funding may be prevented from submitting to them. This may have an adverse
effect on their career and profile.

OA & the REF. There has been the suggestion that
publications submitted for consideration to the next REF may have to be OA. If
so, there are implications about funding, timescales and, once again, whether
academics are able to submit to the top journals.

Dr James Baker(School of History) had a more positive
view of OA. He had worked on KAR, as well as working as an academic in History,
and had thus seen the subject from two perspectives. He regarded the move
towards OA as ‘a good thing’, as the current model for academic publication was
unsustainable: even Harvard library was saying it could no longer afford
subscription fees.

Misunderstanding. The response from the History
discipline suggested that there was some confusion and misunderstanding in the
community. An open letter from 21 leading historical journals had suggested
that OA sanctioned plagiarism, which was untrue. In addition, there was a level
of hypocrisy in the claim that OA would ‘require authors to sign away their rights’,
as they already had to do so through traditional publication.

Monographs. Interestingly, there was little provision
for monographs in the Finch Report, although this was the main avenue for
publication in the humanities. Jisc and the AHRC had funded the OAPEN-UK
project, to gauge whether allowing online access to monograph texts had had an
effect on book sales. The results thus far suggested it hadn’t.

Trudy Turner (Information Services) discussed some of the
issues that IS, in support of the academic community, was facing in
implementing OA. KAR would be at the forefront of this, and there had been
considerable investment in making it fit for this purpose. KAR had 24,000
publication records, of which half included full text. This was a good
proportion, but it was unclear how many publications had not been recorded at
all. Nationally all institutions were having to ‘navigate the landscape’, and
all were considering what the best model for funding publications should be.

Dr Simon Kerridge(Research Services) outlined some of
the pros and cons of OA, before presenting a ‘straw man’ OA policy for
discussion. The University did not want to restrict publication or academic
freedom; however, there was a need to consider how best to distribute limited
funding for OA. If it did not support OA there was the danger of facing RCUK
sanctions. Moreover, OA offered potential benefits, such as an increase in
citation rates. The straw man policy suggested that the University should
encourage/mandate green OA through KAR.

Prof Diane Houston(Graduate School) highlighted the
potential impact of undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) publications. All
PGs publish, and many UGs do too; should the University accept responsibility
for paying for them to do so through OA? If the University did pay, there
should be different criteria for publication from those applied to staff, and
there was a need for a level playing field between disciplines.

Discussion

The Vice Chancellor asked for an indication of support for OA
generally, and for green OA specifically. The majority of the audience appeared
to accept it.

However, a number of questions were raised following the
speeches, and issues covered included:

How would international collaborations or multiple
authored publications be handled?

How seriously would universities implement or monitor
OA policies?

Who is the perceived audience who do not already have
access to academic publications?

How would funding to facilitate OA be agreed and
distributed?

Should the sector collectively oppose the Government’s
policy on OA?

Conclusion

It was agreed that a representative working group be
convened to further develop and consult on the ‘straw man’ OA policy.